Math Masters Trace Their Intellectual Lineage

Just as retirees scour FamilyTree.com for evidence that they’re descendants of famous people, mathematicians are diagramming who their adviser was advised by, who their adviser’s adviser’s adviser was, and so forth. This nerdy pastime has been formalized on the Mathematics Genealogy Project website, run by North Dakota State University. There’s some scientific usefulness to this—a team at Northwestern used the database to discover that more mentoring corresponds with higher publication rates. But mostly, it’s just fun to ferret out how many layers separate you from Gauss. To demonstrate how it works, we created a chart for Gerald Jay Sussman, an AI expert and professor at MIT with an unspeakably rich mathematical heritage.

1. This true Renaissance man did a bit of everything back when science was still coalescing into a distinct discipline. 2. His theory that planets orbit the sun helped spark the Scientific Revolution. 3. The only student of Copernicus, known for badass trigonometry work. 4. Anatomist who gave fallopian tubes their name. 5. Invented the pendulum clock and discovered Saturn’s moon Titan. 6. Coinventor of calculus (suck it, Newton). 7. The brothers were part of an extremely productive family involved in everything from math to aerodynamics. 8. An innovator in calculus, trigonometry, physics, algebra … 9. Made important breakthroughs in classical mechanics. 10. Postulated the existence of black holes; dreamed up the thought experiment known as Laplace’s Demon. 11. Brother of Georg Ohm, of Ohm’s Law in electrical engineering. 12. Gaussian distribution is named after him. 13. Cofounded MIT AI Lab with Marvin Minsky; cocreated Logo programming language. 14. See number 13. Also built the first neural-network simulator. 15. MIT prof who had no idea Wired was going to trace his academic ancestry like this.